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As part of a wide-ranging conversation on the GZERO World podcast, oncologist and Pulitzer prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee walks Ian Bremmer through one of the most groundbreaking uses of AI in medicine today: generative drug discovery. It’s not just about speeding up research—it’s about creating entirely new molecules that no human has ever seen.
Using AI, researchers can now analyze the shape of a dysfunctional protein—like one found in a cancer or autoimmune cell—and generate chemical compounds that could bind to and modify its behavior. “This is true generative chemistry,” Mukherjee says. “Every time we do this in collaboration with a machine, the machine learns it, and it learns it forever.”
The process is like solving a puzzle with a million possible pieces. With each failure, the AI learns more, narrowing down candidates until it finds a match. It’s already produced new antibiotics with never-before-seen structures—and Mukherjee believes this is just the beginning of a medical revolution.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔). GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
In 1971, President Nixon declared a “War on Cancer.” Fifty years and billions in research later, the disease still kills 1,700 Americans a day—and survival often depends on income, race, and access to care. But could artificial intelligence finally give humanity the upper hand?
On the latest episode of GZERO World, Ian Bremmer sits down with cancer researcher and bestselling author Siddhartha Mukherjee to explore how AI is changing the trajectory of modern medicine. From early detection and diagnostics to drug discovery and personalized treatment, Mukherjee believes we're entering a new era in the fight against cancer.
“The machine learns it, and it learns it forever,” Mukherjee says, describing how AI can now generate new chemical compounds that have never existed—potentially designing cancer drugs from scratch. “You don’t need to train a new generation of chemists. The machine will now learn it for eternity.”
Mukherjee explains how this generative power can unlock faster, cheaper breakthroughs across all stages of cancer treatment—from identifying new carcinogens like “forever chemicals” to tailoring therapies to a patient’s specific biology. For a disease that touches almost every family, these advances aren’t just technological—they’re deeply personal.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube.Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔). GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
Listen: Nearly 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women in the US will be diagnosed with cancer, and 1,700 people die from it every day. Disparities persist—Black women are 40% more likely to die of breast cancer than white women—and treatment costs remain crushing for many.
On the latest episode of the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer talks with world-renowned cancer researcher and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee about the future of medicine—and why artificial intelligence might finally tip the scales in the decades-long war on cancer.
Cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the US, killing nearly 1,700 people every day. But Mukherjee says AI is already reshaping the field, from radiology and diagnostics to identifying new carcinogens and designing entirely new cancer drugs. “Every time we do this in collaboration with a machine,” he explains, “the machine learns it, and it learns it forever.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, Mukherjee breaks down three major areas where AI is advancing medicine: patient care, data mining, and generative drug development. He also weighs in on early cancer detection, how inflammation may hold the key to understanding new carcinogens, and why this moment may be the most hopeful in half a century of cancer research.
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We've been fighting a war on cancer for over half a century—from Nixon’s 1971 National Cancer Act to the promise of cutting-edge AI therapies today. Ian Bremmer reflects on how that war is going.
The numbers are still grim: nearly 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women in the US will be diagnosed with cancer, and 1,700 people die from it every day. Disparities persist—Black women are 40% more likely to die of breast cancer than white women—and treatment costs remain crushing for many.
But there’s progress. Survival rates have more than doubled since the 1960s, and new technologies, especially AI, are opening doors researchers couldn’t imagine a decade ago. For Ian, it’s personal. Both of his parents died of cancer. “If you haven’t had it yourself,” he says, “you know someone who has.” But for the first time in decades, there’s real hope that science may be gaining the upper hand.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔). GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
Graph of new college graduate unemployment compared to the national average, with new graduate unemployment surpassing the national average for the first time in 2022, when ChatGPT was released and the AI revolution began.
You can’t step outside these days without hearing someone talking about AI’s impending slaughter of white-collar jobs. So far, the evidence that AI is shifting the broader labor market is thin, but among new college graduates, the story looks different – unemployment is rising faster for them than for the workforce overall.
Since we opened the Pandora’s Box of chatbots, new grads have faced higher unemployment than the national average for the first time in decades. Which raises the question: are they the canaries in the coal mine that AI-driven job disruption has begun?
“It just seems like there’s not any more entry-level roles,” reports James Kettle, a 25-year-old Columbia University graduate who’s been on the job hunt since May. His experience is echoed in a new Stanford study, which found hiring in AI-exposed occupations for early-career workers is down 13%.
Even if we can’t be certain AI is totally to blame for stealing young people’s existing jobs (yet), it’s making it harder for them to get hired in the first place. Delia Thompson, a 23-year-old University of Virginia graduate who’s been on the hunt for seven months, describes the job process today as “shouting into the void,” as she and other candidates send thousands of AI-assisted resumes through LinkedIn, only for companies to use their own algorithms to sift through the pile – a loop of bots talking to bots. “It makes it feel like a total lottery,” says Thompson.
This is reshaping how many young people are viewing AI overall. As something that gives the illusion of abundance – more productivity, more swipes on dating apps, more options – while making it more difficult to hear the signal through the noise. “AI is making it much harder for everyone,” says Kettle. “[Dating apps] make it harder to find a girlfriend, AI makes it harder to find a job… And for what? For it to just replace those jobs?”
Most of the young people I interviewed predicted that AI would only end up benefiting a small number of people, further consolidating wealth and costing jobs. “No one really wants to be associated with AI,” Kettle continued, “besides shareholders who want to lower costs and to be seen as cool.”
This isn’t this generation’s first rodeo. They have already been the guinea pigs for one revolutionary new technology: social media. They had Facebook in elementary school, Instagram in middle school, and were addicted to them long before the first op-eds hit the presses about how they might rewire a developing brain. It has created a generation of early tech adopters, but also one that’s keenly aware of its pitfalls and ulterior motives.
“God forbid Meta reaches AGI first and the whole world becomes Instagram,” bemoaned Kettle.
Economic shocks have compounded the mistrust. Many graduates grew up in households battered by the Great Recession, were told college was the only way forward, and then took on debt for degrees that played out mostly on Zoom. Now they’re entering a labor market that’s the toughest it’s been for college-educated workers in 25 years – and AI will only make it worse.
“Everything that was sold as the golden ticket turned out to be a nightmare,” says Sam Angel, who has been looking for a job since he graduated from Columbia University last year. “What really underlies this whole thing is just an underlying sense of powerlessness,” Angel told me.
That sense of being shut out is driving political volatility. Forty-six percent of young voters voted for Trump in 2024, up from 36% in 2020 – with the majority citing pocketbook issues. But those gains for Trump are quickly disappearing: his approval among 18–29 year olds has collapsed 44 points, with 72% now disapproving. This generation wanted predictability, and instead got more layoffs – played live on TikTok.
That same anger was evident in New York City when the tagline “billionaires shouldn’t exist” helped win Zohran Mamdani the Democratic primary. Young voters didn’t hear socialism – they heard someone saying that the richer shouldn’t keep getting richer as the middle hollows out.
“People like me are getting demoralized,” Kettle said. “I want to get married and have a kid, but I look at the price of childcare, the price of housing, the price of healthcare. It doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen.”
Today’s graduates don’t feel unlucky, they feel disillusioned. Their politics are volatile, and increasingly shaped by a sense that each “unprecedented” disruption – from the pandemic to AI – keeps breaking the promises made to them about their agency over their future.
President Joe Biden signs an executive order about artificial intelligence as Vice President Kamala Harris looks on at the White House on Oct. 30, 2023.
US President Joe Biden on Monday signed an expansive executive order about artificial intelligence, ordering a bevy of government agencies to set new rules and standards for developers with regard to safety, privacy, and fraud. Under the Defense Production Act, the administration will require AI developers to share safety and testing data for the models they’re training — under the guise of protecting national and economic security. The government will also develop guidelines for watermarking AI-generated content and fresh standards to protect against “chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cybersecurity risks.”
The US order comes the same day that G7 countries agreed to a “code of conduct” for AI companies, an 11-point plan called the “Hiroshima AI Process.” It also came mere days before government officials and tech-industry leaders meet in the UK at a forum hosted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The event will run tomorrow and Thursday, Nov. 1-2, at Bletchley Park. While several world leaders have passed on attending Sunak’s summit, including Biden and Emmanuel Macron, US Vice President Kamala Harris and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen plan to participate.
When it comes to AI regulation, the UK is trying to differentiate itself from other global powers. Just last week, Sunak said that “the UK’s answer is not to rush to regulate” artificial intelligence while also announcing the formation of a UK AI Safety Institute to study “all the risks, from social harms like bias and misinformation through to the most extreme risks of all.”
The two-day summit will focus on the risks of AI and its use of large language models trained by huge amounts of text and data.
Unlike von der Leyen’s EU, with its strict AI regulation, the UK seems more interested in attracting AI firms than immediately reining them in. In March, Sunak’s government unveiled its plan for a “pro-innovation” approach to AI regulation. In announcing the summit, the government’s Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology boasted the country’s “strong credentials” in AI: employing 50,000 people, bringing £3.7 billion to the domestic economy, and housing key firms like DeepMind (now owned by Google), while also investing £100 million in AI safety research.
Despite the UK’s light-touch approach so far, the Council on Foreign Relations described the summit as an opportunity for the US and UK, in particular, to align on policy priorities and “move beyond the techno-libertarianism that characterized the early days of AI policymaking in both countries.”- UK AI Safety Summit brings government leaders and AI experts together - GZERO Media ›
- AI agents are here, but is society ready for them? - GZERO Media ›
- Yuval Noah Harari: AI is a “social weapon of mass destruction” to humanity - GZERO Media ›
- Should we regulate generative AI with open or closed models? - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Talking AI: Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains what's missing in the conversation - GZERO Media ›
- OpenAI is risk-testing Voice Engine, but the risks are clear - GZERO Media ›
- One big thing missing from the AI conversation | Zeynep Tufekci - GZERO Media ›
The Caryn influencer artificial intelligence AI page is seen in this illustration photo taken in Warsaw, Poland on 05 December, 2023.
Since its inception, generative AI such as ChatGPT has run primarily in the cloud: large data centers run by large companies. In that home, AI is reliant on electricity-hungry computers, robust internet connections, and centralized data. But now AI is beginning to move directly onto devices themselves, encouraged by advances in AI models, user-friendly tools, and ideological factors. This transformation has broad implications for the geopolitics of AI.
Whether for corporate or personal use, on-device AI is fundamentally different from cloud-based AI. When running on your own device, AI no longer requires racks of electricity-hungry computers, a reliable internet connection, or particularly custom hardware to operate. From a user’s point of view, one can more safely and privately give on-device AI access to all data on the device — including messages, photos, and real-time location — without risking privacy leakages. The on-device AI could control apps on the user’s behalf, and their apps could also efficiently use the on-device AI. All for free, with no usage limits.
Of course, the largest and most advanced AI models may never fit on a standard laptop; scientific labs might always need cloud-based AI. But as laptops and mobile devices continue to improve — and AI models continue to be miniaturized — an ever-higher percent of AI use cases will become viable on-device.
Geopolitically, on-device AI will scramble much of the current calculus.
As AI moves from clouds to devices, national AI infrastructure may play a less central role. There are already some reports of AI overcapacity in China; President Xi has publicly warned about it. Conversely, the global south might have an opportunity to leapfrog: just as some nations skipped landline internet and went directly to mobile connections, so too may developing countries skip expensive AI data centers and simply rely on AI-capable devices.
Though cloud operators may matter less, device creators will matter more. Globally, America is currently overrepresented, with Apple, Google, Microsoft, HP, and a range of other relevant device creators. China has historically been less relevant: only Xiaomi commands international attention, with less than 12% of the global mobile market. That said, a variety of companies are building next-gen AI devices. If any get traction (with its AI perhaps powered by connected phones), the countries that invent winning AI devices will stake their claim to global AI leadership.
Most countries are not competing for global AI device leadership, though, and most AI devices will likely come from only a few places. For middle powers looking to exercise national agency, new approaches are likely to emerge.
One possibility could grow out of system prompts: short, written instructions given to AI models to guide their behavior and tone. All AIs use system prompts; they are currently written by the companies that make the AIs. Perhaps there might be national system prompts in the future — in the same way that every smart device currently follows the time zone settings of the user’s current location, one could also imagine every AI device following a system prompt settings of the user’s current location.
Imagine, for example, that you visit a foreign country. Now — unless you override the default system prompt, as you can today for the time zone — your on-device AI might skew its default advice to follow local cultural norms and values, thanks to a simple extra section of text loaded into its invisible system prompt. Governments could write those short statements as distillations of national norms and values, and provide them to major on-device-AI makers in a standardized format.
On a social level, the makers of on-device AI have different incentives than the makers of cloud-based AI. In particular, cloud-based AI providers may be tuning their systems to encourage users down rabbit holes of higher usage, following the same financial incentives as social media providers. Conversely, on-device AI is incentivized to add more value to the customer’s purchase of the device, but the device maker isn't likely to earn extra revenue for every hour of incremental usage. So there’s grounds for cautious optimism: on-device AI may be better aligned with the user’s best self, rather than their most-frequently-using self.
The full secondary and tertiary consequences of on-device AI will take decades to fully appreciate. And the transition itself, while visible in the near horizon, will not happen overnight. Yet on-device AI is coming, and the geopolitics of AI will evolve with it.